Thomas H. Ince

It's Reginald Barker.

It's also Thomas Ince, Thomas H. Ince, who I always feel that Ince is, I don't know if it's the same with you guys in the States, but I do feel he's a bit undermined over here.

Yeah, I mean, if you're studying a certain period, you're certainly aware of him, but he's not mentioned in the same way as some other silent film pioneers of the time, right? Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

I've, you know, I've done other research on, on Hollywood, going all the way back to the earliest days and, you know, there's just, there's always been weird things that go on in Hollywood.

There's always been unexplained, suspicious deaths, you know, going all the way back to, like, Thelma Todd, and, uh, um, Thomas Ince, and, you know, these people from, from, like, the very earliest days of Hollywood, there's been, uh, there's been deaths that have been swept under the rug and, and, uh, very curious circumstances surrounding those deaths.

And, uh, it's just, it's just, there's just been a lot of weirdness [laughs] in Hollywood for a very long time, you know? And, uh, a- and, and, and people in Hollywood tend to do very strange things at times, you know, that just sort of get...

People just kinda shrug it off and, and, you know, accept it as business as usual, you know, when, like, uh, you know, Margot Kidder is found, like, huddled under a bush in somebody's backyard in Glendale, you know? [laughs] Or, or, uh, Anne Heche goes up knocking on somebody's door saying that she's just getting beamed up to the mothership, you know? Or Robert Downey Jr.

Mm-hmm.

Eventually, Hayakawa ended up acting in Los Angeles, where producer Thomas Ince discovered him and put him in movies.

His enormous breakthrough was Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat in 1915, where Hayakawa played a dangerously seductive Japanese art dealer involved with a white married woman.

The interracial sexual element was very, very provocative for the period, but audiences were very fascinated by him.

I guess it's to say, like, this is a quality picture.

I think Ince produced this, right? Thomas H.

Ince, and he was kind of a big pusher of that, right?

Yeah.

That, there, there are a lot of films that, that do that kind of opening the curtain.

So those were two that he'd made right before this, and he was not happy with them.

And he was offered another role by Thomas Ince, and he said, I'm not going to do it.

I want to do a feature.

I want it to be accurate.

So I guess Ince was like, all right, well, we'll help you out.

And there was a.

There was a movie that Thomas Ince had produced from three years earlier with essentially the same plot.

It was not a feature.